The state of Florida, the Caribbean and portions of the Southeastern U.S. are reeling from the impact of Hurricane Irma this week. The deadly storm brought damaging winds and torrential rain to the entire Sunshine State, including our headquarters in Jacksonville.

Last month, Hurricane Harvey became the first major hurricane to make landfall in the United States since Wilma in 2005. The historic storm dumped more than 40 inches of rainfall in southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana, breaking records and becoming the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the contiguous U.S.

This week, the state of Florida is preparing for the arrival of Hurricane Irma, and food and beverage facilities are making plans to ensure safety and minimize damage.

Minimize the top food safety risks in your food and beverage facility

Ask any food manufacturer or processor if they are committed to high safety and quality standards and their answer will, of course, be yes. But even with the strictest standards, thousands of recalls are still issued each year in the U.S. In 2015,the FDA recalled 9,178 products, a 12-percent increase over the previous two years. If you weighed the amount of goods the USDA recalled last year alone, it would be as heavy as 52 Boeing 747 airliners. That’s a lot of product gone to waste.

Your food processing facility’s commitment to safety starts with being prepared. How do you prepared to be… prepared? With your food plant’s emergency action plan (EAP): a required Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) document that defines employer and employee actions during workplace emergencies. While emergency action plans that meet minimum requirements may include emergency information and procedures, they still may not contain enough detail to ensure the safest response to dangerous situations. Your plan must be comprehensive, eliminating all confusion and hesitancy in case of an emergency. A non-comprehensive plan — one lacking extensive instruction or failing to address each emergency — may add confusion to the situation.

USRC’s new rating system gives owners a consistent way to determine facility earthquake safety

In November 2015, the United States Resiliency Council (USRC) launched the USRC Earthquake Building Rating System, a first-of-its-kind performance rating system for seismic hazards. This system is the first reliable, consistent method to determine how susceptible buildings may be to earthquakes, providing facility owners, insurance providers, and engineers with a better understanding of how to prevent losses. The rating system assesses buildings on three important criteria, each of which is detailed later in this article.

Takeaways from the Process Cooling webinar

Recently, Process Cooling hosted a fantastic webinar on ammonia safety, discussing practical advice for industrial refrigeration system operators. As ammonia usage continues to grow with the changing refrigeration landscape, it’s important for all of us to understand ways to keep our plants and personnel safe.

Emergency Response Preparedness Series

After a disaster, your food processing plant must get up and running again as soon as possible. Making moves to clean up or sweep debris may be a tempting first response, but it could be deadly. Instead, you must assess for structural damage first.

Emergency Response Preparedness Series

Construction projects do not always run as planned, sometimes resulting in emergencies that require immediate reactions. From tornados and hurricanes to roof collapses, I know that emergency response is no easy task. With much to get done, crisis communications used to be the furthest thing from my mind when it came to these types of situations. However, managing the press is key to not only avoiding a public relations disaster, but to protecting your employees and business.

Emergency Response Preparedness Series

If your food processing or beverage plant houses an ammonia refrigeration system, an explosion is your worst nightmare. Because your facility is at risk for this type of emergency, it’s imperative to understand both the proactive and reactive measures you must take in the event of an explosion.

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